Getting to Grips with Google

Editor: First off, sorry for the absence. Been real busy. But have not forgotten you readers.

Anyway… Guys, meet Ed Gray. Our new guest blogger. I’m very glad to have him onboard. And I present to you his first article in a article series on SEO. Ed…take it away. Enjoy the article folks.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long been a buzzword in the internet marketing industry. And in spite of that attention, it’s an often misunderstood practice.

Trawl the web for SEO techniques and you’ll be bamboozled by a myriad of conflicting opinions and contradictory advice.

In this series, I’m going to ignore all the waffle and give you a guide on how you can increase your traffic with some practical tips on how to get search results from Google.

I won’t even bother claiming to get you to the top position. Such claims are always nonsense and should be regarded with heavy skepticism.

The aim of this guide is to simply set you off in the right direction, increase your traffic and ultimately increase your revenues. Over the coming weeks we will be going through the following steps:

1. Understanding Google
2. Keyword Analysis
3. OnPage SEO
4. Link Building & Promotion

Follow the instructions and you’ll be well on your way to getting to grips with Google.

It is important to view SEO as an ongoing exercise – SEO practices should vary depending on results, if something is working for you, focus on that.

SEO is very much a trial and error process and should never be considered to be completed.

Understanding Google

Before we get started, it is important to understand how Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are generated, and what factors are important in having a well optimised page. No one but Google can fully understand exactly how it ranks web pages, but we do have a pretty good idea of the main factors involved. These include:

1. Domain/website Age
2. Keyword Usage
3. Host Domain Authority
4. Page Rank

The first here is obvious. Google prefers websites that have been around for a while. That doesn’t mean new sites cannot rank well, it is possible to do well without having this factor on your side.

But there’s no doubt having a site around for a few years certainly helps. This is why it often pays to use previously used expired domains.

The second here is the most misunderstood part of SEO going. I’m sure you’ll have heard people talk about the importance of keyword density, META keywords and the like.

This is all nonsense. Google simply doesn’t care what your keyword density is, and it doesn’t bother to read your META keywords. What number 2 refers to is more about keyword placement than anything else.

This will be covered in the OnPage SEO section and continued into Link Building as it involves how your web pages are constructed and how your inbound links are formed. Host Domain Authority refers to how important Google views the domain.

Good examples of this are sites like Wikipedia, The BBC, Ebay and Amazon. Pages within these sites rank well partly because of how authoritative Google views their domains.

These are important websites and so it follows that the pages within them will contain important information. The final factor, PageRank, is best thought of as a count of votes for a particular page.

As a page receives inbound links, these are considered as “votes” by Google. The more votes, from more authoritative sites, the higher the PageRank.

It was this factor upon which Google originally built their search concept and remains a pretty important factor to this day.

With these in mind, next time we’ll start looking at choosing and targeting the right keywords and keyphrases for your web pages.

Editor Note:  Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.

[tags]EMoneyMarketing, Search engine optimization, SEO, online marketing, page rank, keyword density[/tags]

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I’m glad you mentioned meta keywords. I still see a lot of websites trying to stuff their meta tags with keywords even though the major search engines have stopped putting any value on metas years ago. Looking forward to more posts in this series. -Jason

I think being relevant (keywords in metatags) still help. But definitely does not carry as much weight as before.

Google is now more concerned about latent semantic indexing (LSI) where the context of your article is more important.

Jag

never associate pr with serps – at least with google.
there are more pr0 sites with no.1 organic serps than not – that’s a fact.

meta data has the same power as sitemaps, as does clean code – they are all important as a whole.

ask 100 seo guys – you get 100 different answers.

i will agree with jag foo as lsi is very very very important with google “now”. but as soon as everyone gets on lsi then the algorithm will be changed and we will go back to something else or on to something new.

blogs, article directories, back links, etc… it’s just a never ending rabbit hole and welcome to it :p

good post though Ed – to opposing thumbs up!
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@Baltimore Movers
The thing with keywords is that it’s more about WHERE they are than how many. There was a time when keyword stuffing and other such practices worked quite nicely but Google is a lot smarter than it used to be.

The META Keywords tag is still relevant for Yahoo, MSN and of course Bing, but is still only a relatively small factor. As Jag points out, semantic placement of keywords is far more importan these days, and will get more important over the coming years. We’ll be exploring more on this next time!

Best,
Ed

keywords in meta tags works only in yahoo optimization as far as i know.

@SeO Deeds
Thanks for the comment. Firstly, PR isn’t applied to sites, it’s applied to pages, hence the name PageRank. You’re right, it’s not the determining factor in the generation of SERPs, but it’s a good indicator of how important Google views a particular web page. Pages with higher PR tend to rank better, but there are a lot of other factors involved.

Meta data has it’s uses, as I will explain in the coming weeks, but the Meta tag keywords in particular is useless in Google, I and many other SEOs have tested this.

Meta Keywords is still appropriate for Yahoo and MSN.

We’ll be looking at this in more detail soon.

Thank you for the information. I have a question here. I have a blog which was earlier a NoFollow blog.I was not getting a lot of spams. I heard that if i will make it DOFollow then i will get more visitors and comments.Its true the footfall for my site increased but also the number of spam comments have also increased.SO let me know the answer to this. Waiting.

Meta tags always keep me confused most of the times. Thanks for sharing such an important information here.

Hi,

LSI seems to have some effect. Some websites that provide links impressively on a keyword in your pages down in the rankings. Is it true if a page that has many inbound link will move up its rank?

Ed, your article has opened up my mind, especially the keyword density stuff. It looks like I have following the wrong paths from the beginning. I’m going to change my perspective now…

Thanks for all the great comments and info. I see a lot of opinions on keywords, but not much on “content”.

Any tips on how to use content on your site? How much is too little, too much? How should it be used? Any recommendations?
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I read this sentence “But not even Google feels immune to the worst financial crisis to grip the world since the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929.” Does it mean not only Google can be immune to if so but also what? I am not quite sure. And does the “grip” here mean to get the world under its control?

Harriet

meta tags are really useful and effective way to optimize website. They really helps website to caught by search engines. Great info. Thanks
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@Luxury Yacht Charter
Yes, the number, and quality, or inbound links is a key factor in SEO. I’ll be going into this in detail in the future.

@Wilson Pon
Glad I could help. The next article will be up soon and I’ll go into the myths of keyword density and so forth in detail.

@Tony Lee
With this feature I will assume that you’ve got decent content on your site. But I will be looking at content more in the coming weeks.

@Garage Shoe Rack
By removing the “nofollow” attribute from your blog, your blog may very well be more appealing to spammers. At the same time, it will be more appealing to fellow bloggers and webmasters too. I think this is a fair trade off. If you run wordpress, use Akismet and moderate your comments, it shouldn’t effect the overall quality of your blog and will let you remove the spam before it hits your posts.

I agree about the conflicting opinions…you really just have to try out the different strategies and see what gets you the best results.

Josh

One quick question: as far as back-links do you think directories are still effective?
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@windows driver
That is just referring to the grip of the financial crisis. I hear Google’s advert revenue has dropped a little during this credit crunch, but I don’t think it’s anything to cause alarm.

@gods in buddhism
SEO is a fluid and continually changing process – it’s really about finding what works for your site.

As for link directories, personally I believe they require a lot of effort to get what is a pretty poor link. There are far easier and better ways of link building, which we will cover soon.

@Garage Shoe Rack:

This blog is a do-follow blog. And hell do I get lotsa spam!

Generally, I let it pass as long as the comment is relevant or of value. Expect more spams if you are going do-follow.

In any case, a good plugin like Akismet and maths verification will help you filter them out.

Cheers,
Jag

They’re really helpful. I agree that there are conflicting views on SEO, most of the tips you’ll find are already outdated. The system is evolving. Since search and engines won’t give us clear guides, we can only lay our hands on some clues for effective optimization.

Awesome read. Great breakdown of Google, it frustrates many an online marketer!

Google can be a tough nut to crack…. BUT… I think if you have alot to write about and the content to your blog/website is relevant to meta keywords, meta description, recipricle “dofollow” links and main headings to each page, then google will work its magic. Google also loves new content so keep on posting new stuff.
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@copywriting seo
Very good points. Google does give good advice in it’s webmaster help section, but you’re right, it’s an evolving and ever-changing thing. I will be stressing the fluidity of SEO in coming articles.

@Real Estate Investment Software
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it :)

@John
Content is a very important aspect of SEO, which I’ll be talking about in Part III. As well as content it’s so important to place your keywords in the right places, more on that in the future.

Link building and promotiosn is one of the most basic steps in having a huge traffic. We all know that commenting on Do-follow blogs is also a link building.

This is a great post you have here..

Newbies in the field of Internet Marketing should read this. To understand what ways should they do.

By the way, Can you make an article about do’s and don’t about SEO.

I would love to know more about it.

Thanks. Be back to read more

Wow got to know the real facts about SEO. You have cleared lot of my myths about SEO. But I do follow the concept of keyword density a bit….but I am not a spammer and I dont stuff my metas with keywords..Infact I try to follow Google guidelines for seo and I think quality seo has helped my sites to perform good in SERP’s.

Thanks

@train horns
Thanks for the comment. Link building is key in getting good positions, and I’ll be covering that in the final part of this series.

After that, if Jag will let me, I would like to write a list of top ten do’s and don’ts in SEO.

@Sourav
Thanks for the nice words! Keyword density is still talked about so much, I’ve heard the rumours of 7 – 10% density and so forth. Trust me though, Google doesn’t calculate this. It does look at WHERE your keywords are tho, and which words are more prominent on your page. This will be covered in Part III.

“The second here is the most misunderstood part of SEO going. I’m sure you’ll have heard people talk about the importance of keyword density, META keywords and the like. “

I’ve always thought that META keywords are so beneficial. Only now did I learn that Google actually doesn’t have much use for them. I didn’t know keyword density is not so useful, but it’s the keyword placement.

@Ed:

Of course, I allow you. Can’t wait for the list!

Jag

@sex games
Meta Keywords are still beneficial for Yahoo & MSN, but many of us SEOers have tested and found Google doesn’t. It may read them, but they have no effect on it’s index at all. Stay tuned for more on keyword placement next time.

@Jag Foo
Excellent! I’m looking forward to writing it!

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thanks for give information of Grips with Google and SEO.
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Thanks very much close to no knowledge. What are some of refuge do know that some may go wrong.

Will need to change to be and feel.

I like your article about seo techniques and I have got some useful information from this.I really appreciate your post.

Good Blog. Thanx..
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I like article regarding meta key words and SEO that bring sites up

Thanks for sharing some useful information about SEO.keep it up you have done the great job,

Meta tags always keep me confused most of the times. Thanks for sharing such a useful information here.

I’m very thankful to you to share some useful information about SEO.

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